Zed A. Shaw, Painter

First up, lead poisoning causes damage to the part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) because lead mimics calcium and apparently this part of the brain is constructed using calcium as children grow. Instead of a healthy calcium based structure, it's lead.

This damage then causes symptoms like inability to self-regulate emotions, poor impulse control, ethics and morality issues, and weirdly, the desire to injest more lead. No idea why that is, but I guess if a kid eats lead paint chips they like it and can't stop eating it.

So I thought, "Well shit, that sounds like anyone with drug addiction, ADHD, OCD, depressions, narcissism, body dysmorphia....." I hit wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterior_cingulate_cortex … Seems to be pretty close, but what's interesting is the studies involve "lesions", not lead poisoning.

It seems the main function of the ACC is in detecting errors (although all research focused on visual error detection), and this damaging of error detection then impacts someones ability to regulate tons of other mental functions since regulation requires detecting errors.

The ACC is also responsible for self-awareness, and lacking self-awareness seems to be a central personality trait of narcissism. It also helps judge the reward and pain of future actions, which is a central personality trait of addiction. It also is involved in pain reactions.

Evidence also shows that damage to the ACC is seen in people with depression, Schizophrenia, ADHD, and OSD. Schizophrenia is the most interesting since it involves an inability to regulate sensory experience, which would imply that the ACC manages *a lot* of the brain.

The ACC also is implicated in social anxiety disorders, and could also possibly be connected to autism spectrum disorders since it's involved in judging the results of social interactions. Now, as @peregrine mentions, there's a significant implication of this regarding Boomers.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s was always attributed to the birth control pill, but if you look at the prevalence of lead pollution from WWII on you'd see that the boomers were most likely just poisoned with lead and it damaged their ACC.

Now, post-Boomer people would be smug that it didn't happen to them, however: Apparently 50% (!!!!!) of PoC in poor parts of the US were poisoned with lead. All of those people lived in apartments that were gentrified in the late 90s early 2ks. And....

We know those yuppies moving into that apartment in Park Slope didn't erradicate all the lead paint and pipes that could be there. That'd mean their kids (who are about 20 now) could very well also be poisoned with lead. That could be Lead Baby Gen 2.

Drug addiction could also be directly related to lead poisoning. The fact that it creates a compulsion to injest things combined with an ability to: 1. Control pain. 2. Evaluate potential rewards/punishments. 3. Regulate impulses. 4. Avoid obsessive behaviors. Says yes.

There's also another weird as hell idea I had: You know how people with similar psychologies seem to collect together, or view others like them as totally normal? Get enough people poisoned with lead and nobody would think any of this is weird. It'd be the normal.

Alright, so lead poisoned weirdos who can't control theirself, do tons of drugs, and act like sociopaths are normal. And nobody suspects that, well, maybe Americans are weird because of some poison. Can you say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding …

What if, the Replication Crisis in Psychology is *not* because Psychologists are fraudsters who ran around fabricating bullshit? What if it's just everyone they analyzed was poisoned with lead, and now people aren't, so the results are different?

That'd mean that--since lead poisoning wasn't controlled for--nearly every psychology study for the last 50 years is suspect and wouldn't represent anyone who was not lead poisoned. Like, what if social priming totally works--only on lead babies. Everyone else it doesn't work.

And if you think about what a hell of a lot of psychology is all about it's: Regulating your damn brain. So, lead could be something that totally upends psychology research since it pretty much destroys the part of the brain most psychology is focused on.

Let's take a simple example of Dunning-Kruger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect … What if, actually, everyone who was bad at the self-awareness necessary to evaluate their skill was just a lead baby? That would explain why the effect isn't found in Japan and other cultures.

Final random thought: If the ACC is responsible for detecting errors then it *might* make someone a bad programmer. A huge part of programming is spotting errors just like the ones tested in the studies, so I'd be curious to see if it makes debugging harder too.

I almost forgot a couple more logs to throw on this fire: 1. If the crime goes down because of lead, but the gun purchases stay the same or go up, then it's lead not guns. 2. If crime goes down with lead poison, then men or any race or culture, aren't necessarily more violent.

For #1: You could actually separate out regions with lead poisoning, control for it, and get a better picture of gun violence. You can then focus on eliminating lead as a proxy mechanism for lowering gun violence (and all violence).

For #2: If the majority of men who are violent (or any race or culture deemed "genetically more violent" bullshit) are actually just poisoned with lead, then it could be lead affects baby boys more than girls (which is common with lots of toxins).

Another way to look at a lot of this is: Tons of social, psychological, and political policies and beliefs could simply be because tons of people were poisoned with lead. Prisons, laws, numbers of officers, therapies, racist/sexist beliefs, all need to be reevaluated.

Sorry I have one more, but this one is potentially *super* unpopular: It looks like damage to the ACC also causes things like "alien hand syndrome" and OCD, which could explain people who desperately need to cut off their arm to feel "right". Could cause body dysmorphia too.